THE BEST-SELLER BLUES: HARD LESSONS FROM A COSBY BOOK

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In May 1986, the flanks of buses plying the streets of Manhattan sported jaunty advertisements proclaiming, ''Congratulations, it's a book!'' The happy event they signaled was the arrival of the latest offspring from the publishing house of Doubleday - a compendium of the wit and wisdom of the television paterfamilias Bill Cosby on the subject of ''Fatherhood.'' It was a miraculous birth, indeed: in the United States alone, the book proceeded to go through 30 printings in record time, selling 2.5 million hard-cover copies along the way. Even more astonishing was the small matter of what is called ''contributions to overheads and profits'': figures obtained from former employees reveal that the Doubleday coffers grew between $15 million and $16 million richer courtesy of that one slim volume.

Three years later, the company published the comedian's third book under its imprint - a paean to the joys and tribulations of ''Love and Marriage.'' This time, however, at least insofar as the hard-cover edition of the book was concerned, congratulations proved a little premature. Although the paperback version is currently on The New York Times's best-seller list, the experience for all concerned has been less than connubially blissful. According to a number of former employees, of the 850,000 hard-cover copies printed, only about 300,000 have been sold, with Doubleday's loss on hard-cover sales conservatively estimated at $1.5 million. In addition, author and publisher came to a parting of the ways. In order for the project to squeak into the black, it's probable that at least 800,000 copies of the paperback will have to be sold. How, in the space of a mere three years, did we get from there to here?

The books that grace the best-seller lists are not always as lucrative as might be imagined, and much-heralded books frequently prove to be commercial failures. Each year, with the help of booksellers from across the country, Publishers Weekly complies a list of such works and delves into the reasons why they flopped. Through the years the explanations have been unnervingly consistent.

In the case of fiction, booksellers tell us that publishers and agents often pressure young writers to bring out second novels long before they are ready. Publishers also misguidedly attempt to turn genre authors into mainstream writers. Frequently, nonfiction writers are encouraged to produce sequels to best sellers when such follow-ons serve no real purpose. Information that could be conveyed in a magazine article is stretched thin over the pages of a book that nobody wants to buy. The public's appetite for even the most popular authors can be satiated through overexposure. What can go miraculously right - as well as spectacularly wrong - in publishing and promoting major books? The writing career of Bill Cosby provides a telling parable.

At a 1985 editorial meeting at Doubleday, a publisher that had seen better times, editors tossed around ideas for new book projects. The conversation turned to so-called celebrity books, always popular with publishers. Paul Bresnick, a relative newcomer to the company, needed to establish himself. ''The idea for a book on fatherhood,'' he recalled, ''closely paralleled events in my own life; it was conceived around the time my daughter was. I sensed a new attitude in the air, and so proposed a book on fatherhood.''

Mr. Bresnick approached Russell Baker and later Robin Williams, but both declined. His attention was directed to Bill Cosby, whose television show, offering a Reagan-era vision of unbridled optimism and traditional family values, was beaming its way into homes all across America. Mr. Cosby's public-relations point man, David Brokaw (the son of Norman Brokaw, the head of the William Morris Agency, who has represented the entertainer for 27 years), was interested in the book proposal. Things became serious when Brokaw pere got in on the act, and a deal was struck in the winter of 1985 for an initial advance of $600,000 (eventually increased to about $850,000). Father's Day 1986 was set as the book's publication date.

Although ''Fatherhood'' and its successors, ''Time Flies'' and ''Love and Marriage,'' display only a single author's name on their covers, Mr. Cosby, like so many busy celebrities, would need a little writing help. Mr. Bresnick remembers: ''Bill said he would provide the writer. We worked with that person for a while, but it didn't pan out.'' As it happened, a comic writer named Ralph Schoenstein was also a client of the William Morris Agency. According to Mr. Bresnick, ''Ralph turned out to be the perfect match for Bill.''

Mr. Schoenstein declined to be interviewed for this article, but Mr. Bresnick says, ''All the material in the books was 'generated' by Bill Cosby: Ralph met with him, recorded and took notes from the conversations,'' and eventually ''put the material on the page in Bill's voice.'' People who were privy to the genesis of the books said that under his agreement with Mr. Cosby, Mr. Schoenstein was paid about $70,000 for working on ''Fatherhood'' and about $80,000 for ''Time Flies.'' Given the enormous profits and kudos the entertainer and the publisher both reaped from the projects, there was understandably a certain concern on the part of the writer to have his role in the process acknowledged in the books. However, it was not until the third effort, ''Love and Marriage,'' for which the writer was paid about $100,000, that Mr. Cosby extended in print ''warm thanks to Ralph Schoenstein, whose wonderful voice has joined mine in this book as it did in 'Fatherhood' and 'Time Flies.' ''

As would be the case for all three books, much of the material in ''Fatherhood'' came from the entertainer's stand-up comedy routines. The text (and reportedly even the jacket copy) was reviewed by the Harvard psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint, an adviser to ''The Cosby Show'' whose job, it seems, is to provide the least-objectionable-programming seal of approval.

With everything geared toward a Father's Day debut, a former Doubleday staff member recalls, ''the manuscript came in very late and created a lot of concern, principally because of its scanty length. A designer was commissioned to open the book [i.e., to insert white space to fill it out] . We decided to make it a 'gift' book.''

Although Doubleday was enthusiastic about the project from the beginning, the book was not initially regarded as a potentially record-breaking best seller. Richard Heffernan, a former Doubleday sales director who is now with the Putnam Berkley Publishing Group, says: ''We had thought in terms of trying to advance [i.e., garner prepublication orders for] about 300,000 copies. But in fact, the demand was such that we were able to advance 600,000 copies, and it never let up.'' Eventually, says one former Doubleday staffer, ''the company even managed to extract payments from delinquent retail accounts by threatening to withhold the Cosby book if they failed to settle their outstanding debts.''

During the week preceding Father's Day, the B. Dalton bookstore chain sold 76,000 - and Waldenbooks, an astonishing 95,000 - prepublication copies of ''Fatherhood,'' according to company spokesmen.

Ellen Mastromonaco, then Doubleday's advertising and publicity director, says that the company ''spent over $250,000 on promotion,'' which included a life-size wax statue of Bill Cosby that inhabited the Doubleday stand at the American Booksellers Association's annual convention. Most important, though, as all past and present Doubleday employees associated with the book and all the booksellers I spoke to agreed, were the 10 television appearances that Mr. Cosby made to promote his book. With television's favorite dad plugging his fatherhood book right on the tube, people who would never normally venture into a bookstore were clamoring for it.

''Fatherhood'' is the fastest-selling hard-cover book ever documented. Crucially for Doubleday, it was what is called in publishing a very ''clean'' sale, with only about 5 percent of the books printed coming back from the wholesalers and retailers in the form of unsold copies, or returns. (In recent times, the return rate for hard-cover books has grown to 30 to 40 percent of books printed.) The hard-cover edition of ''Fatherhood'' was on the New York Times best-seller list for 55 weeks, prompted a feature article in Newsweek, was sold to the Literary Guild and was serialized in several magazines. The paperback rights were sold for $1.6 million to the Putnam Berkley Publishing Group, which has managed to sell 2 million of the 2.5 million copies it printed. The paperback edition was on the best-seller list for 48 weeks. Doubleday made some $15 million to $16 million. Mr. Cosby, according to information obtained from former Doubleday employees, made approximately $3.4 million to $4 million.

The megasuccess of a book like ''Fatherhood'' has unusually far-reaching reverberations - both sweet and shrill - for any publisher. On the plus side, it enables the sales machine to get books into merchandising outlets never before reached and to attract consumers who do not normally buy books. It gives a psychological boost to the whole company and can help its other books. But such a huge hit also sets a dangerous precedent. Promotion money and staff effort are siphoned away from other books. And the effect on cash flow is extreme, so that an intense effort is begun to repeat the success and to ward off, at any price, other publishers' attempts to poach the author's next book.

Which brings us to ''Time Flies.'' Mr. Cosby was pleased with the outcome of ''Fatherhood'' and told Paul Bresnick that he fancied doing a book about growing older. The star had just turned 50, and the aging theme was being featured in his comedy routines. Doubleday, meanwhile, was going through a rite of passage of its own. Throughout the summer of 1986, rumors were flying that Nelson Doubleday would sell the troubled company to Bertelsmann, the West German publishing giant that already owned Bantam Books. That fall, he did. With new owners lurking, ''it would have looked awfully bad if we were not able to hold on to Cosby,'' one former executive says.

So hold on to him they did, signing a reported $3 million contract for a book on the subject Mr. Cosby had proposed. According to many former Doubleday staff members, the executives put in place by Bertelsmann - most notably Alberto Vitale (who has since moved on to run Random House) and Jack Hoeft - wanted to make a bullish statement about the company's new direction. It didn't take long: the print run for ''Time Flies'' would be a huge 1.75 million copies. Some publishers maintain that a large royalty advance does not always mandate a vast first printing; others say that if you pay an author $3 million, you have to print very aggressively to justify that expenditure. In the case of ''Time Flies,'' expectations were not to be fulfilled.

Like its predecessor, ''Time Flies'' was published with an aggressive marketing campaign. But instead of coming out in June, it was published in September, and that meant that success hinged almost entirely on what happened during the three months before Christmas, publishing's most hotly contested selling season. To help the book on its way, a nationwide television advertising campaign was broadcast between Thanksgiving and Christmas. On publication day itself, Sept. 14, a two-page article with a banner headline appeared in Newsweek. Two weeks later, there was a Time cover story on Mr. Cosby, who also made appearances on the major television talk shows.

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But although ''Time Flies'' was the third leading hard-cover nonfiction title for 1987 (as opposed to its predecessor's first over all), only about half the print run (900,000 copies) was sold. ''We sold all but about 150,000 copies into the stores,'' Richard Heffernan says, ''but then had significant returns.'' What went wrong? '' 'Fatherhood,' '' Mr. Heffernan says, ''was such a phenomenon, it got everybody - including the wholesalers and retailers - thinking very aggressively about No. 2. But in retrospect, getting old is not as salable a subject as being a father. It didn't turn people on as a gift in the way the other book did. The tighter selling period was also a factor.'' But as one former Doubleday executive said: ''People also tend to forget the most basic thing: the quality of the book makes a difference. 'Fatherhood' was well structured and full of anecdotes with wide appeal. In 'Time Flies,' the material was stretched rather thin, and some of it was not to everybody's taste.'' Yet another factor was hinted at by Time. Commenting on the Cosbying of America - the television show, the advertisements for Jell-O and other products, the concert videos, the movies and the live performances - the magazine noted, ''If anything threatens the fortunes of Cosby, Inc., it is overexposure.''

According to my calculations, Doubleday earned only about $2.5 million from American hard-cover sales of ''Time Flies,'' although when combined with income from sales of its other publishing rights, the book probably made about $5 million - a far cry from the $15 million to $16 million that ''Fatherhood'' made. And yet a greater initial financial investment and just as much staff time and effort were expended.

Still, hope springs eternal, particularly in matters of ''Love and Marriage,'' a book project conceived, this time, by Paul Bresnick, the editor, rather than Mr. Cosby. Having learned some lessons from the ''Time Flies'' experience, Doubleday decided to go back to basics and publish the new book not during the Christmas season, but in late spring 1989, to reach both the Father's Day and Mother's Day markets.

It is one of the more curious quirks of the publishing business that famous authors' advances frequently rise in inverse proportion to the sales of their books. This happens for two reasons. With each new work, writers tend to echo Oliver Twist in wanting ''more.'' And a huge publishing conglomerate is often more immediately troubled by the prospect of a so-called major author going elsewhere, thereby causing the company to lose face, than by the inevitable consequences of falling sales. For ''Love and Marriage,'' Doubleday reportedly agreed to pay Mr. Cosby an advance of $3.5 million, while scaling down the book's first printing to 850,000. It didn't work.

''In retrospect,'' Mr. Heffernan says, ''the title was brought out too quickly on the heels of the others.'' Mr. Bresnick maintains that Doubleday was ''filling a demand from the booksellers that turned out to exceed the demands from the customers.'' Indeed, one of the woes frequently cited by publishers these days is that the huge bookstore chains overorder. But not every bookseller was clamoring for more of Bill Cosby in hard-cover form, and perhaps more heed should have been taken of their caution.

One warning came from within the Doubleday Bookstores themselves. Sid Gross, the chain's merchandising director, recalls feeling that ''the third book wouldn't work.'' And Barbara Morrow, who with her husband, Edward, the president of the American Booksellers Association, owns the Northshire Bookstore in Vermont, says: ''In hard-cover, we sold 97 copies of 'Time Flies,' but only 25 of 'Love and Marriage.' It wasn't unique anymore to have a book by Cosby.''

The agent Norman Brokaw, however, maintains that ''Love and Marriage'' ''did very well, but the publisher obviously overprinted and overshipped the book, and initially didn't advertise as heavily as with the two previous titles.''

Mr. Cosby himself goes farther: ''I remember calling Norman after noticing that Sammy Davis Jr. had a book coming out about the same time as 'Love and Marriage.' Sammy's previous book came nowhere near 'Fatherhood' or 'Time Flies,' yet he had an ad that was larger than anything seen about Bill Cosby's third book. My bosses at Doubleday claimed it was my best book, but they obviously felt the title would sell itself. I told them that Bill Cosby cannot and ought not to go out and pound the media to sell himself. Bill Cosby sells other products, therefore the purchasing public must be told by other means that this is the best Cosby book ever. It is my opinion that the promotion money was misspent, and the campaign was not well thought out. But the blame came my way.''

Strong words indeed. Mr. Vitale countered: ''Nobody really knows why the book didn't work as well as the others. Perhaps it was saturation, perhaps it was publishing too many too soon. But the season was right, the jacket was great, the promotion and publicity (also with the participation of Mr. Cosby) was intensive and the distribution was spectacular - the book was everywhere. We were deeply disappointed that it didn't perform to our level of expectations.''

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Bantam Doubleday Dell, said: ''Within the first two months of the book's life, Doubleday did a full-page ad in People, a week-long national radio campaign, a video news release and best-seller ads in major dailies. The overall marketing budget was in the low-to-mid six figures, the most Doubleday spent for any title in 1989. Yet there was one constant entreaty we heard from booksellers: 'Can't you get Bill Cosby to do more interviews for the book?' The bottom line is, it's TV interviews that sell a personality-driven nonfiction work.''

Whether Mr. Cosby's next project can escape the ghosts of returns past remains to be seen. Norman Brokaw confirms that ''just as the hard-cover of 'Love and Marriage' was coming out, we finalized a deal with Doubleday for Bill's fourth book, on childhood. A contract was ordered, but because Bill saw that the publisher didn't do what it had done with his two previous books, he told me to withdraw from the deal.'' Reportedly, the advance that had been negotiated was $4 million.

The new book, therefore, will be published by the Putnam Berkley Publishing Group. Of course, a connection already existed through its having published the paperback edition of ''Fatherhood.'' But according to some industry observers, Putnam's owner, MCA, may have had more than a little to do with expediting the arrangements, since the company also owns Universal Pictures - responsible for Mr. Cosby's new movie, ''Ghost Dad'' - as well as the television station that, according to Norman Brokaw, parted with ''one of the biggest prices ever paid for a syndicated show'' in order to beam reruns of ''The Cosby Show'' into New York City homes each weeknight. Instead of a multimillion-dollar advance on royalties, Putnam and Mr. Cosby have entered into, as Norman Brokaw puts it, ''a joint venture or partnership,'' whereby the author participates directly in the book's profits. With the entertainer's earnings for 1987 alone estimated by Time magazine at $57 million, and a huge new contract just concluded for another season of his show, Mr. Cosby is not exactly in need of an injection of publishing cash up front.

Neither side will specify exactly what the terms of the partnership are, but Phyllis Grann of the Putnam Berkley Publishing Group says that ''this way nobody needs to risk an extraordinarily high advance.'' But it is precisely because of the perceived risk in bringing out a fourth hard-cover that this unusual arrangement was concluded. ''If there is a terrific success,'' Ms. Grann says, ''the author will get a larger-than-usual share of the benefits.'' But, lest we forget, that would also mean that Putnam will get less.

Some publishing people wonder whether the entertainer's views on childhood - the theme he was most famous for in the early days of his career - will speak to the 1990's. Others express fear that the Cosby camp has never fully come to terms with the reality of what happened with ''Love and Marriage.'' Most important, perhaps, is that even though Putnam is putting 30 months between the appearance of ''Love and Marriage'' and the new book, booksellers, as one publisher put it, ''have long memories. It will take some determined selling to overcome the built-up resistance to a Cosby in hard-cover.''

Of course, the publishing business by its nature is a gamble, so that the meeting place - Las Vegas, Nev. - for last week's American Booksellers Association convention may have been more apt than at first appears. But many argue that the frenzy of the big-money, brand-name, high-stakes bets so many publishers have been making of late is dangerously distorting the industry. Ego and greed on the part of both publishers and authors have helped to create a bonfire of returned, unsalable books. The mass merchandising of hard-cover books - encouraged by the bookstore chains and not discouraged by publishers - has resulted in huge expenditures to print and promote a few titles. An enormous success like ''Fatherhood'' can help pay for an investment in other writers and books, but the losses on a book like ''Love and Marriage'' do the opposite.

Many publishers admit that their most lucrative books started out on a small scale. Booksellers say that what finally counts is originality of material and a realistic appreciation of the scope and nature of the potential readership. These are what will make not just a best seller, but a well-published and well-read book.

Gayle Feldman is an editor of Publishers Weekly.

A version of this article appears in print on June 10, 1990, on Page 7007011 of the National edition with the headline: THE BEST-SELLER BLUES: HARD LESSONS FROM A COSBY BOOK. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe